Retec Interface Lab

Accidents will happen, and it’s surprising how many commonplace items came about by accident, most often through a process of trial and error or as a result of indulging in playtime.

Play-doh was invented by a couple who were trying to invent wallpaper cleaner. The pace maker, super-glue, ice-cream cones, post-it notes and the slinky are all other examples of accidental innovation (if you don’t believe me, Google them).

There are some amazing stories of innovation within business that should teach us all the importance of ‘play’ in R&D. One of America’s best innovators in the auto-mobile industry, Charles Kettering, reckoned that he could reduce the knocking in an engine by getting the gasoline to fire more quickly. Rather unscientifically he looked for things in nature that started quickly, and noticed that a red plant called trailing arbutus bloomed earlier in the year than most others. ‘Would making gasoline red cause it to fire more quickly’ he wondered. Unable to find any red dye close at hand he added iodine to gasoline to change the colour to red and, lo and behold, it had the desired effect. Incredibly, he later tried to repeat the success by adding red dye believing it to be the colour that was the contributing factor. Did it work? Oddly enough, No.

Whilst we hope to have slightly more structure to our R&D lives here, this story does show that without playtime, or the flexibility to indulge in some slightly ‘haphazard’ working practices, then true innovation could be well and truly stunted. Kettering himself once said: ‘If you have always done it that way, it is probably wrong.’

We’ll have to bear that in mind when looking at the teams’ time-sheets, I suppose.

Filed under: Innovation by simonedwards
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As this is the first blog on the new Lab website, let’s start from the beginning and talk about what we do here - innovation.

Once you start to try and communicate objectives to a team, the usual process of pondering semantics starts: ‘What is an idea?’, ‘What is innovation?’, ‘Is it different to invention?’… I could go on but I won’t.

The difference between invention and innovation is a key consideration for the way in which we conduct ourselves here and focus the teams’ activities.

I have read somewhere that the formula to measure successful innovation is:

SI = (i + P + M + L W ) D

In case you’re wondering, that’s (idea + process + marketing + Luck (to the power of work)) multiplied by demand. Hmm.

Thankfully, we have a simpler way of looking at it here. The illustrated equation at the top of this blog is taken from the homepage of our website, and, for me, it illustrates our belief that:

Innovation (in this case, the bike) is a result of taking an idea or invention (such as the wheel) and applying the sum of the combination of research and development to it.

Swap out the wheel in our equation for, say, a caveman’s sharpened stone and one modern day innovation could be said to be the multi-faceted Swiss Army Knife, although that might be an extreme (and badly researched) example, and we tend to work to tighter deadlines than that anyway.

For us, innovation is about taking an idea or an invention that may already exist, or that may come from within our team, and finding a use for it.

So, whilst innovation shouldn’t reinvent the wheel, it must continue to improve the experience of getting from A to B.

Filed under: Innovation by simonedwards
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